How to see currently playing list (NOT the queue)

How do I see the currently playing playlist or album? I can get the queue of upcoming songs but what I want to see is the original playlist. Similar to Spotify’s “Now playing” (or equivalent to pretty much every music player I’ve ever used).

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Are you talking about actually playing a playlist, or, just a record of stuff you’ve listened to prior?

For the first, the playlist exists in the Playlists section, when played the playlist is copied to the Queue.

If the other, then, you can scroll up past the current playing track to see all the track previously played, unless it has been cleared. If that is the case, then you can look under history to see what has been played.

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If I understand the question, it is not currently available but it would be nice to have. The now playing section would be a great place to have all that information displayed.

If your playing an album it has the information shown but the name of the playlist would be nice to see when those are selected.

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Something helpful but not what you are asking about is on the Home Screen. You can see recently played Playlists and Albums.

Ah that’s too bad, it’s such a basic functionality. I keep getting lost in the Roon UI because I can’t just click on a “Playing Now” button or equivalent.

Is there a place to suggest this as a feature? It looks like others want the same thing and it’s pretty basic and common functionality.

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It is straightforward to jump to the album of the currently playing track.

  1. Open the play queue
  2. Tap the album cover of the currently playing track
  3. The album will open!
    — To find the currently playing track within the album, you can scroll down the album’s track list until you see the animated “playing” icon next to the track. This can be tedious if the album has a lot of tracks (such as a box set).

That’s when you’re playing an album. If you’re playing from a playlist, I haven’t found a way to jump to the currently playing playlist.

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@mSpot I’m not looking for the album or the queue, I’m looking for a “Playing Now” screen that will show me what I’m playing. That could be an album, it could be a Radio station, could be a playlist.

@Raul_Acevedo I’ll describe this referring to the Roon desktop app (mobile has a different screen layout and features).

While something is playing, the bottom of the screen has what I’ll call a “play bar”, with metadata (album cover, track title, artist) at the left side of the bar and play controls and progress bar in the middle. If you tap anywhere in the metadata area at the left side of the “play bar”, a Now Playing screen will open. Is this what you wanted or something else?

A feature I’ll mention on the Now Playing screen are the icons at the upper right, where you can select between different things to be displayed in the center screen — photo of artist, album cover, credits, music info, artist bio, etc.

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He also wants to see which playlist is playing, and that’s the one that’s missing

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That won’t show the current playlist, only the information for the current track

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On iTunes/Apple Music there’s the simple shortcut Cmd+L (for locate) to jump to where you started playing (album, playlist …). It also selects the current playing song. That would be great to have in Roon.

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You might want to vote for the existing Feature Suggestion for this - it could use a little love. Click on the Vote button at the top of the thread.

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Best place to start is simply clicking the ‘back’ button at the top left of the screen ( >1 times). This is for both currently playing Album AND currently playing playlist (or anything else for that matter). Of course, you need to know where you started playing something in order to recognize the screen… and that’s generally the problem. :slight_smile:

Currently playing Album:
Click on the queue button of the currently playing song in the “now playing” bar (bottom right), then click on the album cover (to the left of the currently playing song).

Currently playing Playlist:
Click Home, click Recently Played → the playlist you’re currently playing will be there.

Currently playing Radio station:
That’s in the “now playing” bar, at the bottom of the screen. :wink:

If you’re serious about returning to a specific “page” where you started playing a song, bookmark it (top right bookmark button).

Now, this may all seem like a bit of a hassle, but I’ve seen my fair share of music players… and it’s rarely a ‘basic feature’ to get back to where you started playing something. Quite often it’s not possible at all.

Roon is “page” - based. It remembers the pages you visited. Once you understand that, it is generally easy to go back to the “page” where you started playing a song.

Roon is “page” - based. It remembers the pages you visited. Once you understand that, it is generally easy to go back to the “page” where you started playing a song.

So it would be easy to implementiert a shortcut to jump back exactly to that page.

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I asked this very same question many years ago as a new Roon user. I would often get lost in Roon looking at other artists, credits, albums, playlists, etc. that I didn’t know how to get back to where I first started playing something. A user answered by pointing me to this list of Roon Shortcuts. Command + E or Control + E takes you to “Now Playing/Queue”. It still isn’t what you (or I) were asking for but I just wanted to point out this is what was listed as Roon’s “Now Playing/Queue”. I would love an easy way to get back to where I started playing an album or playlist. Just like when using a web browser, I can always get back to where I began–either by tabs or history.

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Another workaround is to enable “Show playlist links” in the Album Page Preferences. It still takes 2 clicks and one scroll to go from Now Playing to seeing the link to the playlist in the album’s track list, but better than nothing.

However, this only works for tracks that are in-library.

Unfortunately this isn’t very useful because if for any reason I go “Back” enough times and lose the original playlist, or my phone closes the app after some time, or the app disconnects reconnects…

Well any of these and other reasons the “back” history is lost and I’m back to having no idea what the playlist is.

You seem to have a different issue related to the ‘back’ button causing crashes and disconnects/reconnects on your Roon phone app. This shouldn’t happen. You may wish to create a new topic for those issues.

You do have a point though. It would be nice to have an easier way to return to the page where you first started playing a song. Roon does have some inconsistencies in its User Interface, espessially related to navigation. It doesn’t always adhere to its own ‘browser/webpage-like’ premise, and the differences between platforms (phone / desktop app) can be confusing.

By the way, I was referering to the PC-Desktop app in my previous post. Clicking back/forward to return to the page where you first started playing a song works quit well for me in the PC-Desktop app.

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